When people make statements that zoos are finding it harder to justify their existance I think of stats like this. Yes it's from the US and not Australia, but people are voting with their feet and money and saying that they prefer visiting zoos over attending sporting events.
I didn't say that zoo attendance had disappeared, but that zoos are having to justify their existence in a way they didn't have to many years ago. However, there's a danger in throwing stats around without putting them in the correct context. For starters, comparing zoo attendance to something entirely unrelated (sports) is meaningless. A zoo can be visited any day all year round, whereas sporting events are seasonal and have limited seating, not to mention the different demographics: Your own link says zoos are mainly attended by women (mothers), whereas it's not hard to guess that the bulk of sporting events are attended by men (and probably men with little interest in wildlife, anyway). I can probably find stats that prove that more people attend bullfights than knitting conventions, but I wouldn't be able to imply that bullfighting wasn't controversial on the basis of that statistic.
What I'd be more interested in is whether that zoo attendance is rising or falling and an even bigger question would be: If all of those zoos didn't pay lip service to conservation and had absolutely no educational material, but were clearly in it purely for entertainment and profit, would those numbers remain the same? Your link suggests not:
AZA said:
Two out of three adults visits a zoo or aquarium with a child
94% feel that zoos and aquariums teach children about how people can protect animals and the habitats they depend on
79% feel better about companies that support wildlife conservation at zoos and aquariums
66% are more likely to buy products and services from those companies
Judging by those stats, your link seems to support my stance rather than refute it.
But again, collecting stats on the number of people that visit zoos and asking them questions (given that they are already there, at a zoo) only tells half the story. If one were to interview all of the people
not visiting zoos, rather than just tally the ones that do, and ask why they don't visit zoos, perhaps we'd get a more even-handed picture of what joe public thinks?
If you were in Sydney when Taronga first started advertising that they were bringing in new, young Asian elephants and saw the kerfuffle in the media associated with this, you'd realise that public perception of zoos and the animals being put into them is changing steadily. Taronga wisely pulled the conservation card when they defended the import of their elephants, because they knew that "but people LOVE seeing elephants!" wouldn't cut it with the public.
David Attenborough's very first wildlife program for TV was called ZooQuest and had him following zoo staff around with a camera as they collected animals from the wild to stock their zoos. How popular would that program be today? Yes, there would be people that would love it, but there would also be public outcry. David Attenborough himself, while mentioning this program during his recent public speaking tour around Australia, admitted that things were different then.
Public attitudes to animal-related things (lab tests, circuses, zoos etc), at least in affluent, western countries, has changed profoundly in my lifetime and will continue to do so in the future. Smart zoo/aquarium operators know that it is not just morally good, but good business as well, to be seen as a conservation-minded institution and the most important conservation work any zoo or aquarium can do is in its education and interpretive graphics. If you have a million or more people coming through your doors every year, they just need to pick up a snippet of information from all of the graphics on site and you've made more progress, conservation-wise, than you would by the marketing-trumpeted birth of a lone gorilla baby.
So I still disagree with Johnny's stance that graphics/education is just a bit of fluff which is better replaced by more exhibit space.
